The Structural Roots of the 2023 French Riots: Segregation, Social Disorganization, and Local Delinquency
Résumé
In the summer of 2023, France experienced its largest episode of contemporary rioting, triggered by the police killing of a young French man of immigrant background. Within a week, unrest spread to nearly 900 towns, including small and medium-sized municipalities, causing damage estimated at one billion euros. This broad spatial reach provides a rare opportunity to test theories of the structural conditions underlying urban riots in the French context and beyond large metropolitan areas. Drawing on municipal-level police data, this article identifies socio-territorial factors associated with variation in riot occurrence and intensity. Unlike previous studies focused on major cities, it covers French municipalities with more than 3,500 inhabitants, providing a fine-grained national analytical scale and controlling for local diffusion effects. Multinomial regression analyses reveal distinct patterns across riot intensity levels. For minor riots, findings support hypotheses related to immigration, segregation, and the stability of riot-prone areas. For intense riots, the results further underscore the role of social disorganization, family structure, and local delinquency. In particular, acquisitive delinquency is associated with greater intensity, whereas drug trafficking is linked to lower intensity, pointing to overlooked dynamics involving peripheral delinquent actors. Across both levels of intensity, we find little support for deprivation and youth social integration hypotheses.
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